#dxb302

Today was our last chance to speak with Manuela and the class before we submit our digital documents on Monday. We presented our poster concepts and the typeface as it is and also gave everyone a brief glimpse of our design document. Manuela likes our idea for the hand print but thinks we definitely need to fix up our digital poster although the idea of the map is solid. She made an important point that our choice of style was risky but that it has worked out well. We also got some compliments from the class on our document concept which was nice. Now we just need to finish the documentation and Ashton is going to illustrate the map. 

We also managed to chat with people over at the fabrication labs this week and confirmed that we can laser cut the card for our document cover there.We discussed how to get the font made into stamps for our hand printed poster and we are planning on heading in next week to start experimenting. There is a stamp setting on the laser cutter and because we are planning a single print/session for the font, we are going to use MDF as our material. Rubber was an option we were presented with but the rubber was extremely expensive and impractical for the number of pieces we will need.

Back into Fontlab and we have been trying to get these ligatures working while Ashton has gotten stuck into our process video for the type design. After a bit more investigation we stumbled across a forum in which someone explained that we were missing some other important code to get the ligatures to work. Once we set the language of the type, we were able to view our Open type features and see our ligatures in action! They still don’t work in Microsoft word but everything looks great in Adobe.

There was a problem where all the ligatures were writing over the top of one another but I released it was because I hadn’t set the end guide for the width of the glyphs. Once that was fixed, I was determined to set up kerning however there were issues with Fontlab claiming that we had duplicate pairs of kerning. Unfortunately we were unable to resolve this  despite checking our kerning classes repeatedly so we decided to move on and I’m afraid this may just have to be an imperfection of the typeface due to the limited time we have left. 

Ashton also came up with an amazing idea for our digital poster which was to make a fantasy-inspired map and use our font on the map. The map that inspired her was one of the original Winnie The Pooh illustrated maps of the 100 Aker Woods but the Tolkien style was also something we considered.

We also started our design documentation are currently planning on laser cutting the name Arasgain out of A4 navy blue card which will be placed in front of a copper coloured sheet of paper. We are making the document as A4 portrait but we are going to bind it by hand at the top of the page as an experiment (because university is the time to try these ideas). The navy blue and copper is something we have taken from the image that we used in the draft we did last week for our digital poster. While we are no longer using, we still think it is a beautiful image and the contrast between the flames and night sky is fantastic so its a great basis for our colour pallette.

Today we got stuck into our kerning classes and set up as many rules as possible due to some of the wider shapes throughout the typeface. A lot of this was done by doing trial and error with different words although we knew f, j and y were going to problematic from the beginning. The caps also required a fair bit of kerning since some of them quite angular and have a large space in them like T and I. That being said, I was careful not to over-kern as I was afraid of sacrificing some of the legibility. There are now 16 kerning classes in total but most of these are for single letters.

We also spent a big part of the day trying to decide our theme and name. The problem was that we had a few competing ideas about where to go since the main concept we had maintained throughout development was simply to take traditional calligraphy and make it wild and organic. We had previously considered flora and fauna as a concept but  Ashton thought there was a definite regal essence to our typeface and we investigated royal names and history of Europe. We eventually found ourselves looking at famous Viking kings and and found the name Arasgain, which has been Anglicised to Erskine from ancient Scottish Gaelic. Not only did the word look beautiful but the location and timing pulled together the three concepts we had swirling around. Our original concept based on water ties in with the River Clyde that Erskine sits next to, the rugged and beautiful landscape from the time of Gaelic settlement links to the aspects of type that resemble trees and the Arasgain name relates to aristocracy as the Arasgain (now Erskine) clan have held their titles for many generations.

As a result we mocked up some concepts for the posters. For the hand-printed we want to keep the marbling effect to make the background look like Scottish granite and print in metallic ink over the top to differentiate the type from the patterned background. We then found a photo of a Scottish loch that we liked and mocked up our digital print just to figure out what track we might want to go on.

To finish out the day we wanted to add and kern our ligatures but when we created the symbols, our Open Type liga script didn’t work and the limited Fontlab resources online made it difficult to find out way. As a result we have shelved the ligatures for next session but worst case scenario we may just have to do some tactical kerning to achieve the same effect.

Today was the big day for capitals! With ligatures still under way, we have been finding it hard to choose the name for the font without the full font to play with. Ashton spent a bit of time creating as many variations of the capitals as she could so we would be able to look over and pick which fitted best. This was because she recreated one of the pens that Carly made that we used in the first tute. While we were taking what Ashton had already created into Illustrator, we also spent some time drawing more letters if there weren’t we were already fond of and chopped up any that matched the lower-case so we could use them to create more letter-forms.

The Z was the only letter that didn’t come from this experimentation but was pulled from an earlier experiment I did with caps where i used the flat end of a bottle opener. this was the same experiment that yielded the o that we are now using in the lower-case and as our numeral 0. Letters like L and Y presented challenges (both have similar problems to Z) but the flourishing and imperfect nature of the typeface allowed us to stumble across good forms by accident. We chose to make our E the way we have because a normal E (similar to our F) did not seem to work and made the words look weirdly shaped so we went back to more traditional calligraphy for inspiration. The C was also a letter-form that changed because it was already designed to have a similar width to the lower-case. However when I typed my own (Caitlin) with the font, I thought the upper-case C was ugly and disproportionate so I curved it more and made it smaller.

We then made final adjustments by setting our cap height and setting the caps against the rest of the alphabet. Some of the caps like C and E dip below the baseline because we want them to encapsulate the beginning of the words. Some kerning will obviously be required to account for this.

Ashton was also able to get the ligatures finished and ready in the illustrator file so next time we meet will be an opportunity to get them into fontlab.

IN this lesson we had another talk with Manu about the progress of our typefaces as well as the process we need to complete in the coming weeks to prepare to submit the assignment. 

She gave us feedback on the loops of our j and y which were not quite right and although I was reluctant to change them (the original j is easily my favorite letter) I could certainly see that the legibility was not there. Manu also suggested edits for some of our special symbols and numbers (8, ?, @. %, \ /) just to get them looking more  neat while still being consistent with the organic nature of the style.

We were then encouraged to get as much as we could into Fontlab so we could start typing and testing to see how our letters interact and how the words look. This was accompanied by advice on kerning so it became quite obvious unite quickly that we are going to have to establish a few special rules to make sure this font looks good. It also looks like we will be needing to create ligatures but it won’t be for every letter or letter combination but rather where we see the potential for some really lovely combinations that will enhance the overall effectiveness of the type. Some notes we took while doing this testing are included below:

fi combination, rule for rr, hi rule, f and letters like it need special kerning, need to look at creating ligatures for certain combinations with j, g and other descenders

Today we used Ashton’s experimentation with punctuation marks and symbols to create our symbol set. We chose symbols that had elements similar to what already existed in our lowercase alphabet as well as adopting the dot from the j to create the full stops in our symbol set. The main goal here was to maintain an organic calligraphic look from what Ashton created while also making sure each symbol is legible and recognisable.

In the last tutorial we were able to show Manu and the class what our lowercase font was looking like. We got a lot of positive feedback because it is quite a unique and organic typeface compared to some of the more measured and precise typefaces shown in the class. Manu gave us some clear feedback though to make sure we maintain the organic appearance and make sure that letters conform with the natural movement of the hand rather than simply being copies of other shapes. 

This mostly applied to our g, o, 0 and 6 and the curves used actually didn't start and end in the motion that would be expected of typical roman handwriting. We used the uppercase O from some experimentation I did the day previous with a bottle opener and shrunk it down, which produced a really beautiful o that was consistent with the rest of our typeface.